Semana Santa is the Easter week celebration. It’s a biiiiig thing here in Antigua, Guatemala. Every year, over a million people descend on this very cool, historic town at the foot of Volcan de Agua to see the Semana Santa processions at Antigua Easter. So what’s our outsiders’ insight into the world’s largest Easter celebrations? And how do we end up doing a post-Easter overlanding rocket-blast all the way north through Guatemala, through Mexico, to Texas?
We could regale you with exciting tales of derring-do, travelling the Mexican mainland, following crazy remote routes and being chased by bandidos through the Sierra Madre, but we’d be telling fibs! This wasn’t one of our wildest rides. Instead, we’ll regale you with tales of a fun pootle through Mexico, featuring a Pueblo Magico or two, a new windscreen (finally), some Nun’s Farts (yes, really), and a bit of ‘road-block palaver’ on the way to the border.
Baja California is ‘good’, right? Looking back over our time in Baja it would be very easy to rave on… and on… about how awesome it is. After three months of overlanding there with fabulous beaches, delicious food, sunny skies and great company, we’re finding it hard to leave. But is there any ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’? We found a bit of over-crowding and had a run-in with Mexican corrupt police. Read on for what we hope is a balanced view of the Baja California bad side.
Buenos días, Mexico! We’re back for more beaches and tacos. Actually, there’s way more to Mexico than tacos and beaches but it can’t be denied… Mexico is particularly good at these. We enter the country into Baja California. Our overlanding Baja features fabulous beaches, the Baja 1000 endurance race, a new Starlink, and fish tacos… did we mention the tacos?
Hey world… things continue getting back to normal for us overlanding people. Travel restrictions are easing, borders are opening, quarantining is being dumped. It’s time we did a trip back to Blighty to visit our families. But although ‘rona virus rules might be on their way out, we still have the old logistical and legal rules of parking Cuthbert unattended for a while. Here we ponder some overlanding rules, our time in UK, and why Mexico is always a good idea!
It’s 2020. Blimey. How did that happen? We end 2019 and kick-off 2020 in the south US desert with some expensive food, a piece of England, a biosphere, a nuclear missile, a war hero, many overlanding snowbirds and two new Mexican crowns. Howsaboutthat for variety?
The Wall loomed at the top of Mexico. Crossing the Rio Grande into the USA felt like a mahuuusive milestone in our travels. Not merely the end of Mexico, but Latin America too. Almost exactly four years after we hopped on the ship in Germany to sail to Uruguay, we ended our Latino trail entering the Lone Star State of Texas. Yes, we were absolutely looking forward to greeting Uncle Sam, but our crystal ball predicted change… big change. Some good change, some bad change, but definitely change.
You know what…? Even after a year around Mexico, this place never ceases to amaze us. Not many overlanders tour north east Mexico, they usually dig the western delights of Baja California and Copper Canyon. We did those too, they’re great, but we wanted to start USA in Big Bend National Park. It made sense for us to exit Mexico on the eastern side into Texas. Leaving San Luis Potosi, we steeled ourselves for some long days of tedious driving to the border. But Mexico had a few final tricks up its sleeve. Who knew that north east Mexico had some real little gems???
What with over five years on the road, 46 countries, 180,000km ‘n all that… we think we’ve seen a fair chunk of the world. But rarely have we come across an area so jam-packed with things to see and do as middle Mexico. Around almost every corner is a new chance to marvel, sense, taste, smell, gawp, laugh or smile. I hesitate to offer one of those ‘we went here, then we did this…’ list-type blogs…. but here’s a teeny little insight into our whirlwind of activity…
“Those Mexicans are out to hi-jack your car, steal your dollars, poison your tortillas and eat your Hershey’s”. To some, merely popping over the border to order a taco in Chihuahua amounts to ‘Operation Certain Death’. We could not agree less with that particular approach, but we’d be a bit naïve to not recognise some travel risks. To cope, we’ve developed our own finely-tuned BSMS (Brave-or-Stupid Monitoring System). Every overlander has to tune their own personal sense of ‘brave or stupid’ and Copper Canyon posed a small challenge to ours.
Baja California might reasonably be accused of having a slightly mis-leading name. It’s not actually California at all. In fact, it’s not even part of the USA. It’s the 1,500km long, thin sticky-out bit of land dangling down the Pacific side of ‘mainland’ Mexico. We explored its beaches, kayaked the coastline, drove some remote 4×4 trails, ate too many fish tacos and discovered the new nation-state of the USG. And it turned out to be whale-shark season, so we went for a swim with them too!
Durango. It’s a town, it’s a state of Mexico, it’s one big wild-west movie set, it even lent its name to a movie, and there’s a notorious John Wayne connection. There are few places more ‘cowboys and indians’ than Durango. There we were… just moseying-on through, minding our own business when the whole wild west ‘thing’ just grabbed us by surprise and got us to hang-out for a few days. Why, in the name of Duke’s boots, had we never even heard of this place before?
Driving in Mexico City is a doddle any time… any time that is, provided it’s a Sunday. After our drive up to central Mexico from Acapulco, we shuffled our schedule to drive in on a Sunday, mooch around the capital and see the legendary Lucha Libre fight-night. Then we went to see where a man tried to plug an erupting volcano – how do we think that worked out, eh? We saw a few ‘Magic Mining Towns’ and… oh yes… we also got lost underground!
Okay, sorry… we’ve been slack on the blog-front recently. But in our defence, we’ve been busy doing stuff. And ‘stuff’ includes cruising down to the Pacific Coast for some kayak action and marvelling at the fearless cliff-divers of 1960s hot-spot, Acapulco. But before all that… our doing ‘stuff’ involved having a windscreen fitted!!! Yes, you read that correctly… a windscreen fitted! We now have a clear view all the way to Acapulco!
The key to successful overlanding… meticulous planning? Or just getting lucky? Maybe a bit of both. The real answer is ‘flexibility’. You never know what’s around the corner. Maybe a happy-thing, maybe a snagette, but you’re onto a loser if you can’t flex to deal with it. One sunny day in Belize, we suffered a badly cracked windscreen. We knew instantly that we had a bit more than a snagette on our hands. Here… is a ‘bad news – good news – bad news’ story of overlanding flexibility.
Central Mexico, mid-late winter… it’s the baffling Monarch butterflies migration season. No exaggeration… millions of them. These little chaps are a Mexico bucket-list item for us and a prime example of the inexplicable natural world. In any case, we’ve got a bit of time on our hands still waiting for a new windscreen, so we do a 1,500km loop to see them. While we’re at it, we include a short volcano crater hike at over 4,200m asl (breath-taking in more ways than one) and we follow the trail of Mexican revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata.
Little boys and grown men with their heads on fire, running around the town square to cheers and to loud traditional Mexican fiesta music (obviously!). Fiestas in Latin American towns are always fun, bright and quirky affairs reflecting local colour and tradition. We’ve seen much of such quirkiness in our travels, but in El Tule, Oaxaca, they out-quirk the quirkiest of traditions.
Oaxaca. What kind of a name is that? And how do you even say it?? Well… it’s both a city and a state in south/central Mexico. For the uninitiated, the name’s of Aztec-Nahuatl origins and pronounced Wa-ha-ka. It’s a pretty colonial city, with nice architecture, history and most importantly, some good coffee shops. There’s lots to do for Christmas in Oaxaca and the icing on the proverbial cake, is at around 1,500m asl it has one of those perfectly sunny-but-not-too-hot climates. Nice. It’s a top place to park-up for the festive season, check out some radishes (yes… you’ll see) and to deal with a grumpy glow-plug. It might even be an opportune spot to take delivery of a new windscreen for Cuthbert. We live in hope.
“So then I thought, if I can shout about my own chickens, why not shout about other businesses? Now I make money from that too” Maria is an entrepreneurial lady with a micro-finance loan from En Via to set up her chicken business. But soon she was branching out into the ‘shout-out’ business. I was fascinated to meet her and other women entrepreneurs, to learn the stories behind their enterprises: rug weavers, caterers and an ‘emergency hairdresser‘. Learning about micro-finance in Mexico is one of the most worthwhile days I have spent in almost five years of full-time overland travelling.
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As the crow flies, it’s only 420km through the central highlands from San Cristóbal in Chiapas, to Oaxaca City, but the only feasible routes detour way-down to the coast. Pacific or Caribbean – either way it’s around 800km. A potentially jam-packed arribada turtle beach on the Pacific side lures us in that general direction, but we’re torn with our timing… torn between lingering in places of beauty, or rushing in the optimistic expectation of resolving our on-going windscreen saga. Such are our daily overlanding dilemmas. In the end, we find some (non-Mayan) rubble and a lotta, lotta baby turtles….
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